I think and suspect these animals are far more intelligent than we guessed, and the ethical ramifications of that reality would be difficult to swallow. Many species of toothed and baleen whales are under threat of extinction according to a lot of climate predictions.
I am sure that there were a lot of preconceived biases that blocked scientific research from occurring in this space, but it might also be that we didn’t have the tools to examine evidence until recently.
Scientists are generally very curious, open to exploration, and absolutely want to prove the unproven or refute the previously proven with new evidence. It’s how they make their stamp in their field.
I'm not going to debate this topic here, but for what it's worth you're coming across as somebody who has chosen their stance and is cherry-picking their evidence and anecdotes to suit their biases.
While I agree with your suspicion that a lot of animals are more intelligent than most give them credit for, you're not arguing for that viewpoint well. You might want to revisit how you make your points.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language
https://www.britannica.com/topic/language
I’ve never seen a definition of language in a scientific context that frames it in any other context other than something humans do. Please feel free to show me otherwise. Whether or not you are convinced isn’t really my concern - this is a well known scientific thing.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240572231...
For such a "well known scientific thing" I certainly haven't heard of it nor can find any evidence of your claim. Yes, most papers use communication instead of language, but that's because until more recently there has been little evidence that shows any other species communications have sufficient complexity to be called a "language." E.g. having words and sentences rather than signals with a given meaning.
There is even a scientist claiming mushrooms have language https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsos.2119... !
The closest we currently have to evidence of non-human language use I know of, comes from attempts to teach language to apes, (which is an example of some scientists saying "$organism is doing language", which you claim never happened) The general criticism was that the great apes did fairly well learning semantics but show limited to no syntactic ability.
We do see semantic capabilities in other species and there's long been reason to suspect semantic content in whale songs. Deciphering the Alphabet of whale songs is a great step towards figuring out the semantic structure. When we do, I wouldn't be surprised if we find syntactic structures as well. Until then, calling whale song language is speculation.
Do you have specific examples of places where we have both syntax and semanti
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/magazine/can-prairie-dogs...
Psychic ocean? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)
Distributed beings like coral or slime molds
History has shown that to not be true.
> Scientists are generally very curious, open to exploration
In my experience, it is the opposite. I often find scientists are in fact very uncurious when it comes to anything outside their domain of choice.
[citation needed]
The book Black Hole: How an Idea Abandoned by Newtonians, Hated by Einstein, and Gambled on by Hawking Became Loved is a pretty good one that covers various components of this story, in particular focusing on black holes.
There's far more belief and bias in science than the science community will admit to.
Going back to the context... I think scientists, linguists, musicologists and others have in fact been very curious about cetacean "language" over the decades. There is a hesitation to make "big claims," but that's appropriate... imo.
Regarding intelligence, it's an interesting thing. I'm not sure I understand that assuming animals, in particular cetaceans, to be intelligent requires a "big claim". In fact, it's basically a big claim to assume they are not intelligent. Intelligence is a spectrum, and it does indeed seem to be the case that humans, in general, start from one extreme of that spectrum in assuming that all intelligence needs to be proven. For cetaceans, it's a bit mindboggling at this point that people are still surprised by their intelligence.
Cetacean brains are huge and deeply folded. If you simply look at a whale brain versus a human brain, once would guess that the whale brain is from the more intelligent species. Yes, whales are bigger and thus dictate a larger brain to operate, but it isn't clear what that scaling relationship actually is. And whales are well known to be some of the emotionally evolved creatures on Earth, so it continues to surprise me that there is this hidden assumption that they need to be proven to be intelligent. At this point, it would seem the burden of proof should be on those who think they are not intelligent.
In my opinion, part of the bias is in our own unintelligence. For us to consider something intelligent, it seems we require burden of proof such that the "other" intelligence is related back to our own. However, this completely precludes the perspective and perhaps even discovery of there being different intelligences. For example, the part of the brain related to emotional intelligence in whales dwarfs our own, all relative to the rest of the brain. Thus, it might be hard or even impossible for us to understand such emotional intelligence. This is actually where I think the science might be tunnel visioned. There needs to be more thought put into what intelligence actually is such that we might recognize intelligence that isn't like our own.
In fact, the best try to remain child-like in attitude, i.e. being able to be in awe about nature, which adults tend to "unlearn".
These sounds are thought to be language
These sounds are not thought to be language
The default position ought to be "we're not sure if it's language or not", but then why are people so surprised when they find out it is?
A claim is an assertion of fact. Science doesn’t make unproven claims. It tests them.
Really, the whole point of science is that claims have to be falsifiable with evidence, which is more or less the opposite of provable. Nothing is ever positively proven in science, hypotheses are only ever falsified, and only hypotheses susceptible to falsification with evidence are scientific. A failure to prove a hypothesis false is the closest we come to establishing a positive scientific truth.
As for your latter point, I doubt that most scientists studying animals are the ones against preventative measures in regards to extinction. There are plenty of ethical reasons to prevent extinction of a species without ascribing human characteristics.
It’s accepted that there are unique “dialects” and cultural artifacts amongst different pods of orcas, for instance. They’ve been observed engaging in highly clever and coordinated attacks on prey (that can differ drastically depending on culture). It’s not really “running amok” to make a conclusion that they’re probably not coordinating and passing along cultural artifacts/hunting techniques by telepathy, but I do acknowledge that we don’t know everything.
However it's obvious that human language has much more complexity than just that. Barring undeniable and extraordinary evidence of communication of similar complexity to humans, the claim that cetaceans have language in the human sense remains extraordinary.
"There are no solutions …only tradeoffs."
—Thomas Sowell
Just like no one wants to admit that we cause untold suffering to billions of cows and pigs every year in our factory farm matrix.
That's why we don't talk about animal intelligence and language the way that we should.